I was wondering if we were a more technologically advanced intergalactic civilization, could we crack a planet open like an egg and mine the core without things like gravity making it impractical.

Would there be measures we could take to make it more practical? like planet-sized scaffolding to stop a planet collapsing into itself while the core is removed? or something like that?

A little background to the question: I'm making a space trading/combat game and I'm planning one of the galaxies to be dedicated to mining on a massive scale, and I'm just trying to figure out how to make it look as epic as possible whilst still being kind-of scientifically plausible.

If you split a large asteroid in two you could do it, but you'd have to give at least one of the pieces a lateral bump so the two halves would orbit each other. But then if it's just a big asteroid it's probably not differentiated like I think you're thinking.

Absolutely you can crack a planet in half... more like blow it up into a bazillion pieces, but whatever. You simply have to overcome the gravitational attraction of the mass the planet is composed of.

For example, to blow up the Earth, you need to have 2.2 x 1032 J of energy. For reference, this a weeks' worth of energy from the Sun. The Sun's ENTIRE ENERGY OUTPUT for a week's time. It's also equivalent to about 3 x 1018 Hiroshima Atomic Bombs.

Why would you want to do that? In what way would that be beneficial to your mining operation? You think it would be somehow easier to, I don't know, do it conventionally while there are useful things like an atmosphere, and gravity and whatnot helping the whole process along...

I'm planning to use it as a story element, not a gameplay one. The idea is kinda like if you were making massive spaceships and wanted to get a ridiculous amount of materials, instead of hiring a million workers to work the crust manually you just get a massive weapon and blow a planet apart and use spacecraft to gather the materials.